Right of center Americans have been ridiculing the vacuity of Sean Penn for years but he’s had his critics on the left as well and the Daily Beast recently joined that small group of left-wing sources critical of Penn with a devastating piece lambasting Penn’s pretensions at being a social commentator and journalist.

There is no doubt that Penn is a skilled actor. He’s turned out some wonderful performances over the years and deserves acclaim for it. But his penchant to support murderers, oppressors, and dictators makes of him a clown of the first order in his off-screen life.

For the left-leaning Daily Beast, Michael Moynihan was sharply critical of both Penn’s self-assigned label of journalist and his cozying up to oppressive dictators and did so in no uncertain terms at that.

Of Penn’s bloviating as a self-proclaimed journalist, Moynihan was unsparing.

Reading Penn’s journalism is not unlike consuming a [Fidel] Castro speech: it’s unbearably long, always rambling and tedious, and frequently incoherent. Take this latest dispatch from Penn’s Huffington Post blog, where he coughs up this furball: “Ostreicher, whose innocence was maligned by an arrest where only vague illusions to money laundering have been shown to be fabricated by corrupt officials within the Bolivian judiciary, whose motivation has proven to be extortion.”

Or how about this stew of words, which is apparently related to the shootings in Newtown, Conn.: “This can, and is, being very easily exampled with newly invigorated discussions with attention on the recognition and treatment of mental health, and certainly that is a priority. And to be responsible to that priority, we too have to recognize its applicability to the mental health of our American community at large.”

As a wordsmith, Sean Penn wields his keyboard as if using a sledgehammer to chisel glass.

What is worse, of course, is the illiterati that treat Penn as if he is a real writer worthy of reading. When Penn goes off on his idiotic forays lionizing brutal dictators Fidel Castro and the evil clown in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, too many left-wing dupes like Bill Maher or Charlie Rose fawn over Penn as if he’s a sage for the ages instead of the clumsy penned commie simp he is.

Moynihan also lambasted the dimwitted actor for his love of the world’s murderous oppressors. He scoffed at actor Josh Brolin’s foolish claim that Sean Penn is a smart and “curious” man, for instance.

“This is exactly backward. If anything, champagne chavistas like Penn suffer from a distinct lack of curiosity, mixed with a heavy dollop of Hollywood orientalism,” Moynihan scoffed.

Sean Penn has made a fool of himself pretending he is a writer and many on the left understand that even if they don’t want to be the ones saying so in public, it really is the truth.